Transactions via UPI see 38% jump in November

Further, November saw the entry of players like PayPal into the domestic payments scene and also Paytm going live on UPI.Pratik Bhakta | ET Bureau | December 02, 2017, 08:48 IST

The Unified Payments Interface, the smartphone-based bank-to-bank instant payment system, continued to post steady growth, buoyed by increased adoption by consumers and the entry of major technology giants onto the platform.

In November, it clocked 105 million transactions, a 38% jump from the previous month, showed data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) that runs the UPI platform. The number of transactions was the highest ever for a month on the platform. The value of transactions rose about 37% to Rs 9,679 crore in the past month from Rs 7,057 crore in October.

While there are 61 banks live on the UPI, a major chunk of transactions is coming from smartphone-based payment applications built by technology companies. Tez, the payment application from Google, posted the largest chunk of transactions, followed by PhonePe and the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM), bankers said. “Since our launch in Sep- tember 18 till November 18, we have clocked around 74 million transactions and have recorded 10 million users,” said a Google spokesperson.

Flipkart’s payment arm PhonePe reported around 33 million transactions in November. “We are seeing a 50% month on month growth rate in the transaction volume on our platform,” said Sameer Nigam, chief executive officer of PhonePe. Meanwhile, BHIM, which is being promoted by the central government, recorded 8.2 million transactions in November, up almost 8% from the previous month, NPCI data showed.

While the volume growth on the UPI platform is a positive indicator of the digital payments story of the country, bankers said most of the transactions were peer to peer in nature where people were using the platform to transact among themselves.

“While the UPI growth story is a very positive trend, what we need is to get small merchants and kirana shops to start accepting UPI payments and that would bring a marked change in the digital payments ecosystem of the country,” said a senior banker with a private sector bank.

The entry of technology majors like Google, Truecaller and Pay-Pal onto the platform has helped in increased consumer adoption of UPI. November also saw the entry of Paytm, the biggest digital payments instrument in the country, onto UPI.